The first CII Banaras Biennale, titled KASHI/LIGHT: City as Sensorium, runs from November 27 to December 31, 2026. Over 35 days, exhibitions, performances and heritage experiences will spread across Varanasi, with Bharat Kala Bhavan at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) at the centre. Preview Week, from November 27 to December 1, brings museum walks and a Food Festival and Handicraft Haat at Namo Ghat.
The Ministry of Culture, Incredible India, the Uttar Pradesh government, BHU and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) are institutional partners. JSW, Adani Group, JK Cement, RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group and Triveni Engineering & Industries back it privately.
Tarana Sawhney, Chairperson of the CII Art & Culture Committee, traces the idea to Venice. CII’s task force formed in 2018, and within a year it was co-organising the India Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the first since 2011. KNMA was curator and chief sponsor.
“It was the first private-public partnership of this kind that had ever happened globally in the art and culture sector,” she says.
Banaras follows the same logic, with a twist. “This is sort of curatorially led, but industry driven,” she says. Biennales in India have usually been led by artists, curators or foundations. “But here the might of the industry is coming behind it.”
“Banaras is a very obvious choice because we didn’t want to create a Biennale, which was a festival that just went in, kind of engaged with the city and left,” Sawhney says. “We also don’t pretend to know better than Banaras.”
She says the programme looks at the city across art, textiles, craft, music, dance, performance and film, plus “legacy initiatives” meant to outlast the show. The Biennale’s website says CII will launch a Healthy Weavers Initiative in Ramnagar, Lohta and Badi Bazar, aimed at an estimated 4,000–5,000 weavers and their families. Bharat Kala Bhavan is being restored, and Sawhney notes that work “is going to be left for them to use.” CII has also signed an MoU with BHU.
“I would hesitate to call this a festival because to me, a festival is temporary,” she says.
Sawhney is most excited about what has stayed hidden. “90 percent of the Bharat Kala Bhavan’s collection, which is unparalleled, by the way... has never been seen,” she says. Delicate textiles are also coming out of storage.
The Peshwa Haveli, closed for four years during restoration, will open “for the first time in all its restored glory just before the Biennale.” There will also be concerts on the ghats for two to three thousand people, and performances on boats.
The timing is bold. Dev Diwali falls three days before the opening. “How can you make Banaras more beautiful than Dev Diwali, right?” Sawhney asks. The Biennale, she says, will interpret the ghats differently.
The title is Gayatri Sinha’s. Kashi, she explains, is linked to prakash, light. The Skanda Purana, she says, already speaks of a luminous city. “Going to Kashi is illumination.”
“Sensorium” came from a different observation. Many pilgrimage sites are quiet. “Kashi is not silent,” she says. “It’s got bells, it’s got incense, it’s got noise, it’s got crowds, it’s got the churn of humanity.”
Sinha rejects the usual biennale model of artists competing to be avant-garde. “My Biennale... is to engage with what the city has,” she says. The core is Bharat Kala Bhavan’s collection, which goes back to Harappan times. The question is whether the contemporary can leap across that distance, through “resemblances” or “great contrasts.”
The museum has let her place a contemporary sculptor’s work beside a Mauryan-period object. “It’s very surreal,” she says. Portraiture runs from Mughal courts to colonial commissions to today, when “you may not even see the human body fully.”
A photography exhibition follows the city through the camera, from the British photographers who reached Kashi in the 1860s to the American William Gedney in the 1960s, Raghu Rai and a younger generation. “The river allows this memorialisation,” Sinha says.
Funding, Sawhney admits, was the hard part. Few companies include culture in their CSR mandates. She hopes the Biennale changes that, though Banaras eased the way. “Had it not been Banaras, I think it would have been more of a challenge.”
Her measure of success is local. “I hope the people I see the most at the Biennale are actually the citizens of Banaras.”